Gather Darkness - Illustrated, page 9
“I’d sooner you had the reward than my father.“It murmured.
A bony palm was clapped over his mouth.
“You’ll bring them down on us! Get up. Brother Jarles! It’s not far, but we must hurry, hurry!”
It was less painful to get up than to lie there and be tugged at. After a little while he managed it. though the effort made the darkness reel dizzily and brought back the visions. As he staggered along beside her, leaning on the skinny shoulder, it seemed to him that she kept changing. First his mother. Then Sharlson Naurya. Then Mother Jujy. Then his mother—
“Let me call them.” he said, smirking foolishly. “No need to look for them. Just let me call them and they’ll come. Then—just think—you’ll have the reward all to yourself—the whole reward. Or are you afraid they’ll cheat you out of it?”
For answer, he was struck across the mouth with a cane.
“There he goes! There he goes! Someone with him!”
Sudden turn into a side passageway. Eager voices baying from all directions. Another sharp turn. Then he saw Mother Jujy tugging at the weeds, tilting up a whole section of them.
“In! In!”
The blow’ had given him a little sense. He let himself down into the black hole she liad uncovered, half-climbed, half-slipped down a short ladder, rolled away from the bottom of it, lay there.
The shouting was cut off. Pitch darkness. Silence.
After a while a light was struck, and he saw the ancient face grinning toothlessly at him over a candle flame.
“So you see how* Mother Jujy claims her reward. Brother Jarles!” she cackled. “Mother Jujy turned you in, didn’t she? Oh, yes!”
She hobbled over to-him and poked at his shoulder, lifting the cloth. He gritted his teeth.
“I must fix that.” she mumbled. “Fever, too. But we must go a ways first. Drink this.”
She put a little bottle to his lips. The fiery liquid made him gag and gasp.
“Burns, doesn’t it?” she observed gleefully. “Not like the wines of the Hierarchy, is it? Mother Jujy makes her own nectar. Mother Jujy has a still.”
He looked around,
“Where are we?”
“In one of the tunnels of the Golden Age.” she replied. “Don’t ask me what they were for. I don’t know. But I know what they’re for She giggled slyly, bobbing her head. “Just ignorant old witches! The priests know all about us! Oh, yes!”
He stared at her. puzzledly.
“Ah, don’t bother your addled wits, Brother Jarles, Just come with Mother
Jujy.’’
He followed her. In places the tunnel was almost whole—a circular tube of dull metal, big enough to stand in. More often it was cracked, and floored with dirt. Once or twice they passed crude shorings, obviously recent.
The trip seemed endless. Before it was over, he was very sick. His fever had gone up, fanned by exertion and perhaps by Mother Jujy’s flaming nectar.
He began to stumble. The visions came back. Only now Sharlson Naurya walked at his side, in darkly gleaming raiment. They were King and Queen of Hell, making a tour of the Underworld, conducted by their prime minister, Mother Jujy, whose cane had become a staff coiled with living serpents. Behind them walked a man who was all blackness. And around their feet gamboled half-human apes.
Another ladder. Mother Jujy driving him up it. A narrow bed like a box with one side open. Short for him, but wonderfully soft. Against his tortured shoulder the blissful coolness of a bandage soaked with a dark, aromatic liquid.
Momentary twitch of fear because he had never been doctored by anyone but a priest. The priests doctored everyone. < Something warm trickling down his throat. Softness. Sleep.
His next conscious moment, omitting feverish visions with perhaps bits of reality jumbled in, began when he saw a black, blurred something squatting on the bedclothes over his feet. He concentrated on it patiently until it came into focus.
It was a large black cat, washing her paws and regarding him with a stony judiciousness.
That-didn’t seem right. It oughtn’t to be a cat. Mother Jujy ought to have something small, and furry, and alive— but not a cat.
For an interminable period, he vaguely pondered the problem. All the while he watched the cat, half expecting it would speak to him. But it only went on washing is paws and judging him dispassionately.
Gradually he became aware of his surroundings. His bed was a box, after all. A box built into the wall of a room. His view of the lower part of the room was cut off by a solid railing which held in the bedclothes.
The ceiling of the room was low, with all sorts of things hanging from the rafters. He could hear a little fire singing and something bubbling in a pot. It smelled good.
He tried to look over the railing. That brought twinges of pain, not very bad but enough to make him catch his breath.
The old crone hobbled into sight.
“So you’re back with us again, eh? For a while Mother Jujy thought she was going to lose her little boy.”
He was still obsessed by his problem.
“Is that just a cat?” he asked weakly.
The witch’s wicked-seeming eyes, brighter by contrast with the leathery sockets, regarding him narrowly. “Course! Though she gives herself awful airs!”
“She doesn’t suck your blood?”
Mother Jujy made a contemptuous sound with her gums and tongue.
“Maybe she’d like to. But just let her try!’’
“But … then … are you a witch, Mother Jujy?”
“Certainly! Do you think I make myself unpopular for fun?” She acted highly insulted.
“But … I thought … I mean, the other witches I met—”
Jarles’ confused remark trailed off, but Mother Jujy seemed suddenly to understand.
“Oh, them! So you’ve met some of them, eh?” It sounded like an accusation.
He nodded feebly. “Who are they?”
She glared at him. “You’ve asked too many questions already. Besides, I don’t know. And it’s time for soup!”
While she was spooning hot broth into him, with the cat come up to sniff the bowl and follow the movements of the spoon, there was a knock at the door. Mother Jujy hissed, “Not a peep out of you, now!” She slid a section of the wall across the front of his box, leaving him completely in the dark. He heard a muffled flop, as if a hanging of some sort had been dropped down.
The cat stood up on his chest. He could feel the pressure of the four paws, like a little table.
From the room came the sounds of talk, but he could not make out what was being said.
Presently the cat lay down on his good shoulder and began to pur. Jarles fell asleep.
During the next few days, the section of boarding was slid in front of Jarles* bed many times. After a while Mother Jujy omitted to drop the hanging, so he could hear fairly well what went on. He listened to the old witch dispense dubious-sounding magic and hard-headed advice to all sort of Commoners, especially girls who sounded as if they belonged to the fallen sisterhood and who couldn’t have their fortunes told often enough. He made the acquaint* ance, in this indirect way, of Megatheopolis’ scanty and indigent criminal class, with whom Mother Jujy seemed on suspiciously good terms. Apparently she acted as a fence.
But those were not all her visitors. Twice, deacons came. The first time, Jarles was tight with apprehension. But, strangely enough, the fellow turned out to be genuinely desirous of obtaining Mother Jujy’s sorcerous aid in winning back a girl who had been stolen from bint by a priest. The second time was worse. The deacon sniffed around suspiciously, spoke meaningfully of the penalties for illicit distilling and other illegal activities, and rapped the wall in one or two places. Bui apparently that was merely his customary way of behavior. for he finally got around to telling a story somewhat similar to that of the first deacon. Jarles was vaguely glad when he heard Mother Jujy sell him a piece of magic the performance of which would involve several toilsome and degrading actions.
And once, Mother Jujy entertained a Second Circle priest. After some sanctimonious hemming and hawing, his reverence cautiously referred to certain “unpleasant mental visitations.”’ which Hierarchy psychiatry had apparently not been able to banish satisfactorily. He seemed to be fishing for magical advice, though he never came out and asked for it.
That set Jarles thinking. He recalled a rumor he had heard in the Sanctuary of a delegation of rural priests come to the Apex Council with a tale of supernatural manifestations. Perhaps the grounding in materialism and skepticism given Hierarchic novices was not so solid after all. Perhaps the superstitious beliefs acquired in childhood always lingered on, below the surface, despite the deepest psychoanalytic probings and personality reintegrations.
He tried to remember what the Black Man had said about the use of fear as a weapon. The coven meeting now seemed almost a part of the hallucinations of fever. But he thought about it a great deal. And he plagued ^Mother Jujy with questions about them, until he had wormed considerable information out of her, although be had the impression that she knew a little more about them than she would admit.
According to Mother Jujy, it was only a very few years ago that the “new witches” had first cropped up. At first she had thought that they were directly inspired by the Hierarchy, and that the priests had decided to “run us old women out of business/’ Mother Jujy was intensely practical and very shrewd about most matters, and was very well aware of her status as a tolerated and ignorant supernumerary in the Hierarchy’s pageant of the supernatural— though always stoutly maintaining that she “knew a thing or two more” than the priests thought she did.
After a while she had changed her opinion of the new witches, until now she seemed to regard them as not altogether unfriendly business rivals. She admitted to certain sketchy dealings with them, though of what sort she would never tell Jarles.
But as to who they were, their aims, and their methods, she had little to say. And for what little she knew or had heard of their methods—their ability to project darkness, raise phantoms, and especially their use of “little people” or “familiars”—she expressed the profoundest contempt. She seemed to consider such things as unfair and over-elaborate competition, too suggestive of Hierarchic procedures.
The “little people” particularly excited her disgust.
“I wouldn’t have one if you paid me!” she asserted shrilly, almost spitting. “Mother Jujy’s seen some nasty things in her day, but nothing to come up to them. Creepy, crawly, snuggly, dirty-minded little brutes!”
But when Jarles asked for details she maintained she had never actually seen one, “and glad of it!”
As his burned shoulder healed, with a white-ridged pit in it, and his fever abated—slowly, since the marvelous restoratives of the Hierarchic physicians were lacking—Jarles mulled this information and the New World he had been introduced to from behind the panel of his wall-bed—a world of Fallen Sisters, thieves, superstitious deacons, and hardbitten witches. He had come to have not a little respect for his snarly and bitter-tongued nurse, but there was one thing about her that still puzzled hint persistently.
One day he asked her straight out. “Why did you rescue me, Mother Jujy ?”
She seemed perplexed. Then she .leered at him and said. “Maybe I’m in love with you! There’s many a pretty boy Jujy helped out of scrapes and hid away when she was the sweetest little dickens in the whole sisterhood.”
After a moment she added gruffly. “Besides, you were halfway decent to me when you wore the robe.”
“But how did you ever find me ? How did you happen to be there in the ruins, when they were tracking me down?”
It was merely chance, Mother Jujy told him. She had just happened to be coming out of the tunnel. Later she amended this by claiming to have had a “vision” of his predicament. He knew she was not telling the whole truth.
Late one evening—he felt restless and had insisted on getting out of bed and walking up and down the room, ducking and weaving around the stuff hanging from the rafters, impatient to grapple with reality—there came a knocking at the door, quite different from any of those he had learned to recognize. A lilting tattoo of rippling fingers. Grimalkin, the cat, mewed queerly. Mother Jujy drove Jarles back into the wall-bed. Then she went to the door, unbarred it, slipped outside, and closed it behind her.
It was very dark, but comforting her was a deeper darkness, man-shaped.
“I see you,” she said tartly, though a little nervously, pulling her ragged shawl a little tighter against the cold. “And you needn’t go pulling tricks to show off. You can’t faze me.”
“Grimalkin knew my knock,” answered a laughing voice. “Shall I send Dickon in to play with her?”
“She’d scratch his eyes out! What do you want?”
“How is our patient?”
“Wants to get up and set the world on fire! I have to tie him down.” “And his—education?”
“Oh. I think he’s getting a little sense. Hard knocks ha^e a way with them. He’s tough, though. Got a slam-bang, drag-out mind, for all lie’s a gentle boy. Still, I think he’s softening toward you people—worse luck for him!”
“Good! You are too modest, though. You underestimate the influence of your companionship on him. We are much beholden to you. Mother Jujy.” “Beholden pudding!” The old crone drew herself up. and stuck, out her shriveled chin. “Listen, I’m willing to do you people a turn now and then, because I know you’re out to get the priests. And I was glad to help that muddle-headed boy for you when you showed me how and where. But there’s one thing I always want you to understand. I saw through you from the first. In spite of all your tricks and stunts and gibbering little monkeys, you’re not real witches!”
There was a half-pleased chuckle from the darkness. “Let us pray that the Hierarchy never achieves your penetration, Mother Jujy.”
She ignored the compliment. “You’re just fakes,” she persisted, “I’m the real witch!”
The darkness bowed. “We will not dispute the honor with you.”
“That’s right!” said Mother Jujy, with a certain grim and vigilant satisfaction.
VII.
“Asmodeus says we’re stepping up the pressure, Drick. Tonight the wolves come to Megatheopolis. Just sniff around the outskirts at first, but they’ll get bolder afterward. Beginning at midnight, telesolidographs in all key cities will be working twenty-four hours a day. We should have our second one set up here by then. You boys can operate it in shifts. Fun. But watch your eyes. Meanwhile, all covens are to put every-orfe they’ve got on second-stage persecutions of priests of the top four circles. Here are the tapes listing the basic individual fears of susceptible priests holding key positions. You can attend to distribution.”
The Black Man shoved across the desk a box packed with tiny wheel-shaped containers. The other young man—short, burly, shrewd-faced, and wearing a similar black tunic—glanced at the identifications on them and snapped the box shuf.
“I’d like to know where Asmodeus gets such detailed information,” added the Black Man, rubbing his dark-circled eyes. “If I were religious, I’d say he was the Great God—he knows so much about the Hierarchy.”
Drick leaned forward. “Maybe he’s in the Hierarchy.”
The Black Man nodded, frowning thoughtfully. “Maybe. Maybe.”
“Drick looked at him queerly. He noticed it.
“I’m not Asmodeus, Drick. I’m not even sure that I’m top man in Megatheopolis, though I do seem to be the first to get instructions.”
“From where?” Drick put his hand on the box. “A thing like this. It’s a physical link. You had to get it from someone.”
“Surely.” The Black Man smiled, a little wearily. “It’s logical to assume, if I walk into this room and find a box on my desk, that I got it from someone. But whom?”
“That’s how it came?”
The Black Man nodded.
Drick shook his head, dubiously. “We sure do a lot on trust.”
The Black Man chuckled. “Still, there are advantages to the arrangement. Secrecy pays, Drick. For instance, how many witches know the location of our headquarters here ? Most of them think that the Coven Chamber is headquarters. Only you and I, and a very few others, know differently. And even we don’t know everything, by a long shot! So if any one of us is caught, he won’t be able to give the whole show away, even if he’s—persuaded to.”
“They haven’t caught any of us yet.’/ Drick sounded a trifle cocky.
The Black Man looked up at him slowly, his impish face suddenly dead serious. “You’re not, by any chance, thinking that’s because they cant? You’re not doubting that they haven’t spotted some of us, and are just waiting to get an angle on the higher-ups before they pull in the net? You’ve not stopped praying, have you, that they haven’t got a line on the location of our headquarters here? You’re not forgetting, are you, even for one fraction of a split instant, that we’re up against the smartest, tightest little old organization that ever was ?”
Drick looked a trifle taken aback. He frowned, a little worriedly. “No, I’m not.”
“Good!” Something of the impish look returned, “You know, there’s another feature of our organization that’s going to give the priests trouble when they begin to pull us in. Most past secret societies were organized in rigid military ranks, like the Hierarchy. Ours is considerably more confused and chaotic, with more emphasis on individual initiative. For example, I have detailed instructions, as you know, for taking charge of operations on a wide scale, in the event that something should happen to Asmodeus. Yet I’ve never seen Asmodeus! So you see, Drick, even if the priests caught two thirds of us, they still wouldn’t be able to deduce the nature of the uncaught third. They’d never be certain that the seeming higher-ups weren’t really lower-downs, and vice versa.”
Drick put his elbows on the table. “In that case, you still might be Asmodeus. Naturally you’d have to deny it.”
